by Derek Morrison, 26 June 2011
The first 6 minutes of the BBC’s Click program for 25 June 2011 contains an interesting item about how some schools have taken radical decisions about the role of technologies in their classrooms and whether “the cheque is worth the tech”. Featuring New York City’s Hudson High School (Twitter @hudsonhslt), the private Long Island University, and New York City’s iSchool the item contained such assertions as “… expensive multi-year services service contracts are no longer necessary and some schools and colleges have gone so far as to design their own software solutions to further drive down costs” followed by a sequence of Long Island University students using an in-house iPad app earthquake simulator. The item then segued to how the NYC iSchool exploited Skype to provide their students with remote access to outside speakers, experts, authors, and other students from sites thousands of miles away. Cue the Skype in the Classroom initiative which at the time of reporting was used by over 12,000 teachers in 186 countries. Although primarily an upbeat Click item, the concluding minute acknowledged the issues that learning technologies have brought to the fore, e.g. equity of access to devices and connectivity, plagiarism, and the need for the technology to blend into the background. On the question of plagiarism Alisa Berger, the founder of NYC iSchool offers a useful message that should give pause for reflection everywhere ” We have found that when kids feel what they are learning is valuable to them they don’t want to cheat because they feel there is value in knowing it, and I think that is a cultural shift that will occur in our society”.
You can watch the item on BBC iPlayer. The episode also appears to be available from the previous episodes section of the BBC Click site so that may work for non-UK residents. There doesn’t appear to be another source for non-UK residents as yet although YouTube does appear to have an ad hoc collection of Click related items.
